We spoke to conductor Christoph Altstaedt about our concert of contemplative music on Good Friday, including Strauss’ Metamorphosen and Haydn’s Seven Last Words of our Saviour on the Cross. The following are edited excerpts from an extended interview available on YouTube.
I think there is an additional weight when approaching a concert on Good Friday … I feel very much that religion structures our year. I like these festive days – I look at them as an opportunity to reflect about my personal meaning, my purpose in life, my time left on earth, and how to spend it. These kinds of thoughts are often forgotten in the stress of daily life. It’s good from time to time to just stand still and reflect on these things.
For the purpose of a reflective concert on Good Friday, you choose pieces which are special, something which goes beyond an entertaining, usual overture-concerto-symphony programme. It gives us the opportunity to find a transformative equivalent of the meaning of the day in music that cannot be found in just [one single] work.
Looking at the state of the world at the moment, I feel more and more this need to go to arts and music and to be comforted by them. Music and art have the power to speak truth and a humanistic kind of wisdom that we do not see naturally in daily life and politics at present. I feel a need to return to these special, reflective works to regain my inner strength and belief in humankind. Looking for a meaning in music beyond the notes is something we should always look for. It can be religious, or totally secular – there is not a difference, I think.
A Journey Through Tonal Musical History
The programme for our Good Friday concert has a link from the very beginning of tonal music to the very end of tonal music. The Seven Last Words of Christ is written in ‘musica antica’ or old music style. His original score of the work contains marks of this notion of ‘musica antica’, such as square-shaped minim notes which were common in early choral music – a reference to the basic fundaments of how Western music has historically been notated.
Strauss, on the other hand, in Metamorphosen, expands tonality to its absolute maximum. Written in a time when atonality was already established, including techniques such as twelve-tone. For me, the Metamorphosen is Strauss’ way of bidding farewell to tonal music as the fashionable, pre-World War II mode of composition.
On Haydn
Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Christ was a piece originally commissioned in 1786 for the very specific purpose of contemplation on Good Friday. Haydn was commissioned to create contemplative music for a church ceremony. The ceremony, at the time, was held in the church of Cadiz in Spain, and lasted for three hours, and was meant for reflecting on the seven last occasions Jesus spoke while in his corporal form prior to his passing.
Hadyn himself favoured this work, and revised it as an oratorio in 1796, adding both an opening and a closing piece to the work. While the ‘earthquake’ music that concludes the work is symbolic of biblical narratives of curtains torn apart and the sudden beginning thunderstorms. The ending is thunderous, and very wild after seven movements of musical meditation – as though we are being shaken back into ‘real life’ once more. It is a brilliant, genius effect.
On Strauss
With Strauss, there is no real outer stimulation or purpose for the composition of Metamorphosen. The piece feels as though it was written after a very long and fulfilled compositional life during a very dark time in Western history – during World War II. It feels more like an inner reflection on life in general. Strauss had considered setting Goethe’s poems surrounding the topic of metamorphosis as a choral work. Instead, however, he composed it as a purely instrumental work for strings instead, giving it a more enigmatic feel.
There is a feeling of constant shifting within the music, tonally and emotionally, much like the shifting of thoughts and emotions throughout life, especially during difficult times one may face. Strauss was, at the time, witnessing the destruction of the cultural sides of Germany in the last months of World War II, including the bombing of the city of Dresden and of the Opera House in Munich. The work may have been written in response to what Strauss saw as a brutal ending to artistic life, which Strauss would have viewed as a profound personal tragedy. There are also musical quotes to be found within the work that pay homage to Beethoven’s Eroica, and the words ‘in memorium’ can be found written at the end of the score. Does Strauss mean for the work to be in memorium of Beethoven, or in memorium of general German musical and artistic culture that had come before such a harrowing time, or in memorium of his own artistic life? We just do not know.
The ending of the work feels intimate and tragic, yet you feel comforted by it. I have goosebumps after listening to this work. There is also a sense of comfort that there is hope to be found. Yes, there is painfulness and sadness, but there is also hopefulness and joy. In fact, the entire range of emotions one can find in a lifetime. This work, in this way, feels like life itself.
Book tickets for our Music for Good Friday concert on Friday 18 April with the Northern Ireland Opera chorus, soloists Mary McCabe, Jenny Bourke, Euan McDonald, Seamus Brady and conductor Christoph Altstaedt, featuring Haydn's Seven Last Words of Christ and Richard Strauss's Metamorphosen.